Since the Windows Live Writer Backup Utility won't work under Vista x64 at the moment, I'd like to describe how you can do this manually.

The complete settings consist of four parts:

• Blog Templates
• Blog Posts (drafts and recently posted)
• Plugins
• Registry Settings

Blog Templates

The blog templates reside at C:\Users\<your user name>\appdata\Roaming\Windows Live Writer\blogtemplates or when using C# you should use Environment.SpecialFolder.ApplicationData followed by \Windows Live Writer\blogtemplates to get the path.

Blog Posts

Your blog posts are located in the "Documents" folder inside a sub folder called "My Weblog Posts". C# knows the "Documents" folder as Environment.SpecialFolder.Personal.

Plugins

If you installed any plugins for Windows Live Writer, you will find them inside your "Program Files" folder underneath "Windows Live\Writer\Plugins"

Registry Settings

Last not least, you have to open regedit.exe and navigate to HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Microsoft\Windows Live\Writer. To backup, simply right click, click "export" and write the settings to a .reg file. Double click this file to import the settings again.

This great tip is masterminded by a colleague of mine, Prakash Punnoor, who fell in love with the Penguin OS.

He says that

...would be the right thing to do with Vista.

Well, as you may have guessed, I don't share his opinion ;)

No really, I like Vista. It's not perfect, but it's on the right way. SP1 won't fix all problems and the Media Center still has a long way to go, but it never really let me down since I first installed it using the Beta 2. And since this is the last tip in the Vista Tips Galore, I thank you all for reading and for your feedback.

When watching TV or other videos, the video decoder integrated into the Vista Media Center isn't really that great. The PowerDVD video decoder is much better and faster, which for example eliminates the sometimes stuttering video when using the standard video decoder.

After installing another video decoder, you have to tell Vista which one to use. You can either do this performing some artistics in the Vista registry, or simply by downloading a very small tool from Garry Whittaker called VMCD.exe.

After starting it, you see the following dialog allowing you to choose a video as well as an audio decoder for use with Vista Media Center.

I would recommend leaving the audio decoder as is and setting the video decoder to PowerDVD as shown in the picture.

If you don't like the view in which Vista Media Center starts up by default, you can change that using some command line parameters:

Aero effects are quite nice, but some of them can be annoying after some time. If you also like Aero and don't want to switch back to the old XP Standard Theme, you can tweak the Aero settings quite a bit.

You find those settings buried inside the performance options:

• Open the Control Panel
• Go to System and Maintenance -> Performance Information and Tools
• Click on Adjust Visual Effects in the Tasks area.

In the popup window go to the Visual Effects tab and select Custom. Now you can disable certain options:

I disabled the following:

• Animate windows when minimizing and maximizing
• Fade or slide menus into view
• Fade or slide ToolTips into view
• Fade out menu items after clicking
• Slide open combo boxes
• Smooth-scroll list boxes

For those of you not liking the transparent glass effects (e.g. in headers of windows) you can disable those too by deselecting Enable transparent glass.

As I mentioned in the Vista Tip 16: User Folders in Vista and How To Move Them post, Vista finally(!!) supports symbolic links similar to those Linux ones. Although there are a few restrictions, symbolic links are quite useful!

Why use symbolic links?

Let's say you have a server for storing your digital pictures and you want to access them on your desktop. You could create a network share for those pictures and mount a drive under a new drive letter on your desktop. Let's say you also like to store some pictures locally and not on the server. Since Windows allows you to have only one Pictures folder you cannot wrap both local and server stored pictures under the same Pictures folder.

Well you can with symbolic links: Vista brings a command line tool called mklink. Using the tool symbolic links (as well as hard links) can be created with a snap.

To merge your local and server stored pictures you simply open a command line inside your Pictures folder and use the following call:

mklink /D myServerFolder \\<my server name>\<my server share for pictures>

This would create an new directory called myServerFolder inside the Pictures folder pointing to a network share on your server containing the server stored pictures. You can then simply browse your pictures regardless of whether located locally or on the server. It's completely transparent to the Windows Explorer besides a small shortcut icon for the symbolic link folder.

Try it and I promise you will love it!

The somewhat unimpressive input field in the Vista start menu yields great power, but it can be extended even more. A small program called Start++ from Brandon Paddock extends the start menu with powerful, customizable extensions called Startlets.

You can:

• Perform a web search
• Look-up something Wikipedia or Dictionary.com
• Play all music matching certain keywords, or by a particular artist
• Send an e-mail to a specific contact
• "sudo" - Run a command as an Administrator
• etc.

Start++ is expandable through Startlets in the form of Commands or Gadgets. Yes, you get it for free, but since it's CareWare, you might consider a donation.

By default Vista fills the initial view of the start menu with often used applications. The order of those applications may change based on how frequent an application is started. One can make sure, that an application stays permanently in the start menu.

Just Right click on an application in the start menu and select Pin to Start Menu.

This even works for any .EXE file in the Windows Explorer! Right clicking and selecting Unpin from Start Menu detaches an application from the start menu.

Microsoft seems to think that never ever anyone shuts down their Vista computers.

When pressing the red shut down button in the start menu, Vista goes to sleep instead of really shutting down. This behavior can be changed in the depths of the system:

• Press Start
• Enter power (which searches for something containing the word power)
• Select Power Options
• Click on Change plan settings underneath the active power plan
• Click on Change advanced power settings
• Expand Power buttons and lid -> Start menu power button
• Select Shut down in the drop down list

This is something I stumbled upon, which isn't really obvious. You can actually grab the bluish status bar in Windows Explorer and drag it upwards to display more meta data of the selected file.

You can even edit the meta data in this view!

The meta data of files sometimes contains sensible information, which should be removed before e-mailing the file for example.

Vista now has the built-in functionality to remove this meta data. Just open the context menu of a file and go to the Details tab. To remove the meta data, click on the Remove Properties and Personal Information link at the bottom.

It's possible to show a file content preview in Windows Explorer:

This option is hidden behind Organize -> Layout -> Preview Pane. The preview not only works for image files, but for all files with a preview handler installed, e.g. for Office 2007 files.

Vista offers the feature of choosing between different file views, which can be changed using the context menu or the slider behind the Views button in Windows Explorer or the Desktop.

You can change those views more quickly using the mouse wheel: Just hold CTRL and turn the mouse wheel.

The context menu of files and folders in Windows Explorer can be extended with a new entry "Copy To Folder", which greatly simplifies frequent copying processes.

• Open regedit.exe and navigate to HKEY_CLASSES_ROOT\AllFileSystemObjects\shellex\ContextMenuHandlers
• Create a new key named "Copy To Folder" (or whatever you prefer)
• Set the Standard value in the right window to {C2FBB630-2971-11D1-A18C-00C04FD75D13}

An entry "Move To Folder" can also be added. Just follow the instructions above and set the Standard value to {C2FBB631-2971-11D1-A18C-00C04FD75D13}.

Vista radically changed the location and structure of user folders. No more "Documents and Settings" or "Dokumente und Einstellungen" (in german).

The root for the user folders of a specific user is located under c:\users\<User name>. This folder can be accessed over Windows Explorer where it is located underneath the Desktop folder.

Localization

The c:\users folder is always named users regardless of the operating system language, but on a german version of Vista for example the user folder is named Benutzer. Why is that? Well, inside the users folder lives a file called desktop.ini. It can revealed by enabling Show hidden files and folders and unchecking Hide protected operating system files in the view tab of the folder options. The folder options again can be accessed by pressing the Alt+T in Windows Explorer.

The desktop.ini looks like this:

[.ShellClassInfo]
LocalizedResourceName=@%SystemRoot%\system32\shell32.dll,-21813

The LocalizedResourceName parameter allows to mask the folder name and replace it with another.

Symbolic Links

Finally Vista uses the benefits of symbolic links in many areas (I'll get to that in a later post). But beware of symbolic links, when trying to move user folders around using registry hacks!

You find more information about that in two posts of Scott Hanselman:

http://www.hanselman.com/blog/MoreOnVistaReparsePoints.aspx
http://www.hanselman.com/blog/WindowsVistaJunctionsAndMovingMyDocumentsToAnotherDrive.aspx

Moving user folders

Luckily no extra tools are needed anymore to move a user folder.

Why moving user folders? I absolutely don't like to place my documents, settings, etc. on my boot drive. I often try something out, make changes to the system and restore backups to keep the system clean(er). When moving at least some of the user folders to another partition, I don't have to bother resetting my system to a previous state, or even reinstalling it.

To move a user folder:

• Right click on the folder in Windows Explorer, e.g. Music
• Click on Properties
• Choose the Location tab
• Click on Move an choose a target folder

Where are the other folders, like StartMenu, SendTo, etc.?

Those folders also located inside the users folder. They can be found at c:\users\<user name>\AppData\Roaming\Microsoft\Windows, but you have to enable Show hidden files and folders in Windows Explorer (see Localization).

An easier way to access those folders is to open the Start Menu and enter shell:sendto for example. This works even with Show hidden files ... disabled.